Love The Man Who Rocked the Boat? Readers share 89 books like The Man Who Rocked the Boat...

This work came out in the Roaring Twenties, but the gangsters of that decade had nothing on the 19th-century outfits like the Dead Rabbits and the Gas House Gang.

When the dive bars have names like the Tub of Blood and they’re kept in business by the likes of Razor Riley, One-Lung Curran, and Stumpy Malarkey, you can’t go wrong. But to me the most compelling part was Asbury’s account of New York’s horrendous Civil War draft riots.

The Molly Maguires of Pennsylvania were born in opposition to that same draft, after a Protestant Republican allied with the coal industry used conscription to try to rid the coal fields of Irish Catholic Democrats and mine labor activists before a crucial election. 

This is a gritty, riveting look at the Irish Mob on New York’s West Side in the 1980s.

The author grabs you by the arm and propels you at breakneck speed through the blood-stained streets and barrooms of Hell’s Kitchen. Along the way, he introduces the reader to a crew of crazy characters that you definitely wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

The parts about the Irish mob’s connections to the Mafia were especially enlightening. It’s a very atmospheric look at a part of the city where I worked as a newspaperman in the decade the book came out (and downed pints in some of those bars.)

Murder, gunrunning, drug-dealing, extortion, informers – it’s all there, but it pales in comparison to the tale of how Whitey Bulger, Boston’s pre-eminent Irish gangster, managed to turn an F.B.I. agent from his old neighborhood into a willing ally in the city’s mob wars.

To me, the most fascinating part was the bang-up job that the authors, two Boston Globe reporters, do in chronicling how the Massachusetts State Police were long frustrated in bringing the crime lord to justice because he was being protected from on high.

I loved this one, because I have a buddy who is a retired Massachusetts state cop, and we’d talk about Whitey Bulger on summer vacations, sitting on the beach.

In 1993, a gang of thieves got away with $7 million in a heist at a Brink’s depot in Rochester, N.Y – and the bulk of it has never been recovered.

The cast of characters includes a former I.R.A. man who’d done prison time in Northern Ireland, an activist priest, an ex-cop who became a suspect, and a charismatic prizefighter whose dismembered body was found in Lake Ontario.

I liked this because at the center of it all is the lingering question of whether the missing money ended up with the Irish Republican Army. 

This is a book for members of the Irish diaspora. It tells of the experiences of your ancestors as they fled the conditions prevailing in their homeland.

Often single members of families whose objective was to earn money they could send back to Ireland in order to enable those family members left behind to follow. Too often the welcome they found, after travelling in appalling conditions as human cargo in ships unsuitable for the purpose, was not as warm as they had expected.

A story relevant today as we grapple with the problems created by modern migration from war- and/or famine-ravaged areas of the modern world, often still undertaken in unsuitable boats.

If, like me, you want to read an account of Irish America that is incisive but that also makes you laugh out loud, then I can highly recommend Irish America: Coming into Clover.

Written by former Boston Globe staff writer Maureen Dezell, this sharp portrait of contemporary Catholic Irish America from an insider to the culture explodes every cliché. Irish America: Coming into Clover is accessible history at its best, but it doesn’t just examine the past.

Dezell also considers the status of post-1845 famine Irishness in contemporary America, which she sees as being in deep contrast (both socially and racially) to its former status: in the nineteenth century, the Irish were only conditionally “white” and were initially subject to hostility from American nativists.

Dezell stresses that today, by contrast, the Irish are among the most educated and affluent Americans. This polish is on display in Dezell’s own creative language:… show more.

Ask Again, Yes is a drama about two generations of two families and the tragedy within the book centres on the events of one fateful day.

Mary Beth Keane’s prose is a real pleasure to read and the story itself brings home how often lives are changed irrevocably in a moment. What I also loved about this book was that it takes the central characters from childhood to adulthood and we see how this makes them view events differently.

It’s one of the reasons I enjoy books with multiple narrators – being able to see the way they can justify their own decisions while judging the actions of others. A terrific read.

Caldwell opened my eyes not only to aspects of American history I wasn’t familiar with, but current politics with this heavy saga. Captains and the Kings highlighted the plight of Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s and then widened the scope to show the follies of the social classes, political corruption, and greed into the new century. True events and historical figures are woven into this fictional tapestry with such skill that everything seems plausible. I ended the read fearful for our future, like I’d typically get from reading a dystopian novel. It’s an intense read needing tissues, a search engine for looking up historical tidbits you might not be familiar with, and possibly a dictionary. The book haunts me to this day—in a good, though horrific, way.

Disfigured and jobless after a fire, Timothy Wilde takes a job with the newly formed NYPD. He is assigned to the Sixth Ward, right on the border of the Five Points, a ward notorious for the desperately poor who live there and the rampant crime. One night he finds a young girl running through the street in a nightgown soaked with blood. She tells an unbelievable story of bodies buried in a nearby woods. Wilde investigates and soon finds himself a target of the city’s wealthy, several of whom are guilty of the most heinous of crimes but feel entitled to escape any accountability. Written in the slang of the times, it reads with the immediacy and plausibility of a memoir. I loved this book because it treats such serious issues: income inequality and the lack of accountability for the rich and powerful—even when engaged in child prostitution and murder.

Thomas’s 2015 novel revolves around Eileen Leary, a tough Irish American nurse yearning to break the middle-class mold in which her life is set when her husband, Ed, a neuroscientist, develops early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Thomas describes his slow deterioration and the ravages inflicted on Eileen and their son, Connell, in drawn-out moments and exquisite detail. In an especially harrowing scene, Eileen stays up all night watching her once brilliant husband struggle with the simple task of tabulating the final grades in his community college class.

Though the narrative sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae, it is as unsparing an account of Alzheimer’s as I have ever read.